The Intuitive Algorithm (1991 Edition): This Book will Change Your Perceptions – Concerning The Mind and Artificial Intelligence – Abraham Thomas

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Consciousness Drive

This book deals with impulse patterns, which nerve cells receive record and respond to with more impulse patterns. A lot of these pat terns can be explained as automatic responses to stimuli. But some are initiated by the system itself. Many processes are launched by the mind. They are not just automatic responses to inputs from the en­vironment. We are not automatons which mechanically react to stimuli. We begin things: We are intensely aware of the continuous processing of Widely differing undertakings by our minds. Continual initiation of activity is an essential element of our consciousness.

We have two ways of explaining this process of initiation of activities. One way is to suggest that there is a soul, a ghost in the machine which triggers all those activities which the mind itself initiates. Some­how, that explanation doesn’t sound appealing. This book suggests a second process, a mechanical process, a Consciousness Drive which virtually compels you into action.

This book suggests that there are neural mechanisms which direct and evaluate sensory inputs, make decisions and set in motion activities which achieve these goals. Each of these mechanisms can be con­sidered to be capable of initiating activities. This book suggests that they do not initiate the activity. They merely carry out the most attrac­tive option of the moment, whatever it is. They are set in motion by an automatic initiating mechanism – the Consciousness Drive.

Consider a machine which rejects faulty components in a conveyer line. The machine keeps making decisions based on the parameters fed into It and acts to pick up bad pieces and throw them into a waste bin.The machine accepts information, decides and acts. Each individual act can be considered to be initiated by the machine. But the machine was only just switched on along with its decision-making process and a mechanism which compelled it to act on its decisions. The machine makes only one decision. We make millions. But the process could be the same.

The Consciousness Drive switches on the decision-making processes and the compulsions to act on the decisions. It has been suggested that all nerve cells are coded to be activated or inhibited by even a single impulse. The neural mechanism is known to be capable of triggering cyclic impulses. The Consciousness Drive impulses put you to sleep, or continually trigger activities in the primary Channels which initiate action. This book suggests that the Awareness Channel, the Feeling Channel and the Goal Channel are continually compelled to function by the Consciousness Drive.

These are areas which accept information, evaluate and decide on the information and initiate activity. These areas are activated when you become conscious. This book suggests that the mind becomes con­scious when this Drive is switched on. It is suggested that this Drive is probably triggered from the reticular formation. Without this Drive, there would be no consciousness. It is notable that damage to the reticular formation causes the patient to go into coma.

Curiosity

There are thousands of neural circuits which perform special purpose functions. Our use of language itself indicates many computing ele­ments which operate in the system. Consider the neural mechanisms needed to arouse curiosity. As explained earlier, an impulse pattern in any association channel indicates a specific area of recognition. When the Perception of the Channel does not relate to any previously ex­perienced pattern, incoming impulses trigger inhibition of every neuron in the Channel. Consider a segment of fibers in the Feeling Channel as constituting a Curiosity Channel. Suppose that a segmental group of fibers in this Curiosity Channel are linked to fibers in the Association Channel, in a code recognition link that will inhibit the fibers if there is an Association Response.

In this situation, there would be inhibition of this segment of the Curiosity Channel if recognition has been triggered in this association region. As explained earlier,Feeling Channel impulses are continually triggered by sequential Consciousness Drive impulses Thus each neuron in the Feeling Channel will receive a dendritic input from the Consciousness Drive, which is an ongoing sequence of impulses which sustains consciousness. Whenever an object arouses interest, association regions will evaluate the object for recognition signals.

When the association regions are unable to recognize an object or an event, these channels will become inhibited. In such a neural system, as long as the Consciousness Drive energizes the Curiosity Channel, impulses will be triggered in the Channel, whenever an Association Channel is inhibited. In this manner, the global Curiosity Channel network would reflect a varying need for information based on the current level of recognition. Maybe, when the level of recognition is exceptionally poor, and the level of awareness exceptionally high, the individual will be “dying of curiosity”! Evidently, Curiosity Responses in the Feeling Channel will trigger Goal Responses which attempt to satisfy curiosity.

Capitalideasonline.com – 23 Oct 2008

In a book worth reading “Rail Roading Economics”, the author, Michael Perelman, writes on the herdlike behavior in capital investments.

“Let us return to the idea of Smith and Keynes that most investments are likely to fail. Nobody went further in this respect than Karl Marx. Marx repeatedly noted that new technology destroy capital values so rapidly that virtually no factory covers its initial investment costs. In one letter to Engels, he wrote:

More than 20 years ago I made the assertion that in our present society no instrument of production exists which can last 60 to 100 years, no factory, no building, etc., which by the end of its existence has covered the cost of its production. I still think that one way and another this is perfectly true.

Consider an industry where technology is advancing at a rapid pace. Marx cited Charles Babbage’s example of frames for making patent-net-a light woven cloth. The early frames had first sold for 1,200 pounds only to fall to 60 pounds within a few years.

The microcomputer revolution, which has caused the prices of computers to plummet at breathtaking speed, offers a more recent example of this phenomenon. We may think of this situation as a part of the paradox of market rationality: if investors are too rational, the economy will collapse.

Recall Keynes’s image of Buridan’s ass, which starves to death from being over­whelmed with the difficulty of making a decision. For Keynes, irrational animal spir­its rather than rationality drive investment forward. For Smith, these animal spirits are doubly irrational, since most investors overestimate their chances. Keynes added that if enough investors are confident enough the economy might enjoy a boom sufficient to temporarily allow a good number of these irrational investments to earn a profit.

Here we encounter another layer of paradox. If too many investors are too rational, too visionary, in the sense of making investments capable of revolutionizing methods of production, the intensify of the resulting sequence of price revolutions can overwhelm the market, creating as much havoc as an excess of irrationality. Under such conditions, prices can provide as little information as they would under the influence of a wave of price-distorting speculation.

Remember that the informational content of prices should depend on a degree of stability, or at least predictability. Extraordinary price revolutions can unsettle all previous calculations.

Investors could sink funds in a project based on existing prices only to find out that an entirely new set of prices would be in effect once the investment were ready to produce goods for the market. The new prices might wipe out a substantial proportion of their investment in a short period of time, ensuring that the firm suffers devas­tating losses.

Once firms realize that the risks associated with such near-term price revolutions are substantial, they may fall back on a different type of rationality, choosing to refrain from investing altogether. After all, why should anyone undertake a substantial invest­ment when a subsequent investment might wipe out the value of the initial investment before it can repay itself?

The microcomputer industry is littered with the corpses of failed companies, most of which were founded with the expectation of becoming the next IBM. We might also interpret the example of the Winchester disk drive industry, discussed above, in terms of the rapid devalorization of the capital stock, rather than as a failure of rationality. Taking note of this possibility reminds us that what might sound like absurd irrationality, as in the description of the disk drive industry as reported in the business press, might actually be the result of an excess of rationality.

In any case, once an industry experiences very rapid technical change, firms would not want to invest without some prior assurance that their equipment will not become obsolete soon after it is installed. If this reaction should occur, investment might be paralyzed. Consequently economic growth could be greater if the rate of introduction of new technology were restricted.

Sawyers asserts that such conditions actually did exist in the British maritime industry. “There were times, between the wars, when marine engineering was chang­ing in such a rapid yet uncertain way that firms in the highly competitive shipping industry delayed investment in the replacement of old high-cost engines by the low­-cost engines.”

So while economists build their models on the assumption that markets are rational, irrationality plays a fundamental role in the real economy. No investor can know the future, which depends in part upon the decisions of other investors. Each investor tries to guess future market conditions by guessing the behavior of other investors. These guesses occur within waves of optimism and pessimism.

This sort of arrangement leads to herdlike behavior. If the herd of investors becomes too pessimistic, the economy becomes paralyzed like Buridan’s ass. If investors become very optimistic, they can generate speculative bubbles. At the same time, within the speculative bubbles revolutionary innovations can develop, which can wipe out massive capital values. The rapid destruction of values, either by the bursting of bubbles or by technological revolutions, can unsettle the economy enough to create serious recessions or depressions. The dot-com bubble of the 1990s illus­trates that both kinds of value destruction can occur simultaneously. Almost invari­ably economists avoid such complications by neglecting the role of long-lived fixed capital in their analysis.

This layering of paradoxes of rationality indicates that capitalism is a very complex system built upon a multitude of contradictions. Economists make a grave error in building their models on the assumption that everybody is rational and that economies almost inevitably move toward a stable equilibrium. In fact, just the opposite is the case. What prevents the economy from running off the rails every few decades is a combina­tion of government regulation and anticompetitive behavior on the part of business.”

Capitalideasonline.com – 18 Oct 2008

In a book worth reading “Speculative Capital”, the author, Nasser Saber, writes on systemic risk. Although written sometimes ago, it is relevant even today.

“Systemic risk begins to take shape when the mass of speculative capital is locked in a particular arbitrage position-say, between Treasuries and junk bonds. These fully loaded positions are arrived at by way of consideration of financial factors. But, because of the social nature of finance, they remain highly vulnerable to political and social events. And frequently, the “trigger” events are social and political. The Russian government, for example, defaults on its bond obligations. The general credit in the market deteriorates. The spreads between junk and US Treasury yields increase and individual funds suffer losses. They must either provide additional equity capital or be liquidated. But they have no equity capital; recall that they are highly leveraged. In this way, they are liquidated and the pool of speculative capital as a whole incurs loss. That is system risk.

Under these conditions, the extent of the damage to the system is a function of two factors. One is the size of the adverse move: the more volatile the markets, the bigger the moves and the greater the amount of equity that is lost. The other is the leverage ratio of the individual funds: the higher the ratio, the lower their margin of tolerance to market swings. With the operation of speculative capital constantly increasing the volatility, and the need for comparable returns pushing towards higher leverage, the momentum of the markets dominated by speculative capital is towards the greater risk of bankruptcy. In other words, it is not the failure of one or a few firms, but the common strategy, which triggers systemic risk.”

How we die and what it costs – Subir Roy – Business Standard – 15 Oct 2008

The award-winning Japanese film Ballad of Narayama (1983) by Shohei Imamura tells a story too powerful to forget. A famine-prone mountain village controls its population and ensures survival by following a practice whereby anyone who lives to be 70 is taken up to the nearby Mount Narayama and left to starve and die. The protagonist does not want to do this to his mother (keeps saying till the end, “I have enough to look after you”) but she is determined as she knows her time has come. She wants to end her life with dignity, unlike the neighbour whose sons had to drag him to the mountain.

This story has critically shaped my idea of how to age and die. How to spend your last days is an intensely personal issue and every individual must have the right and ideally the means to make a choice. Modern science is giving us the technology to live longer and longer, and increasing incomes the means to do so. All societies want their citizens to live as long as they wish to and most families want the same for their elderly.

There is a global movement to legalise euthanasia, or mercy killing, for those suffering great pain incurably. Two countries — the Netherlands and Belgium — allow it. Switzerland does not prosecute someone assisting in euthanasia unless it is done for private gain. I have no doubt that euthanasia will eventually be widely allowed as the global population ages. But what about the days leading up to it? A huge part of a person’s lifetime healthcare expenditure is incurred in his last health episode. Even before I decide if I want to ask someone to end my life, can’t I decide if I can spare my family, society and economy the burden of what is mostly pointless medical expenditure?

The middle class in India is rapidly becoming better off and living longer. A burgeoning private healthcare industry is making it possible to do so, often at great cost to families. The industry’s expertise is growing rapidly but its ethics languish several steps behind. Result? I keep hearing innumerable stories and coming across startling instances among relatives of costly procedures and treatments undertaken on very old people, who thereby suffer enormous pain but gain little except perhaps a little longer life. The healthcare industry of course gains unequivocally. Their advice to the family who are then emotionally weak and vulnerable? The chances of success are even or low but we don’t rule it out. More glaring are instances of someone being kept on a life support system costing a daily fortune, the private hospital eventually pulling out the plug not on the basis of an independent medical determination but when the family says, we got no more money. The initial observation by the doctors? People do come out of coma.

Our eldest aunt’s husband became a living family legend when a few years ago all his children, grandchildren and a few great-grandchildren gathered to celebrate his hundredth birthday. The former highly successful lawyer’s mind was still clear and physique good enough for him to take a daily walk. Then a month later he had a stroke and lost mobility and speech. The doctors at the private hospital recommended and performed brain surgery, at great cost but to no purpose. After a month he was removed from intensive care to a general ward as the family said it had no more money to pay for intensive care. He died shortly thereafter.

On the other hand, my mother fell and dislocated her shoulder when she was 81. The senior consultant at the non-profit said, “I don’t recommend surgery at her age.” Instead, he prescribed some medication and a few very light exercises. The pain went but the usefulness of the right arm was very partially restored. Now my mother’s big regret is that, for a person who has all her life loved writing letters, her handwriting has become “horrible”. There is no clear distinction between for-profit and non-profits. Some non-profits behave like the former. On the other hand, there are consultants attached with for-profits who become family friends of their patients and render advice without seeking to maximise billing.

I love the north Indian hills and my dream is to eventually settle in Himachal’s Sangla valley, among the prettiest corners on earth. My wife laughs it off, saying I will never actually do it. The obvious question friends ask is, what happens when you need urgent high-quality medical care? My reply is, what does it matter if it all ends then. I will go to a big town for periodic checkups, take my medicines, follow the recommended regimen, have a GP around to deliver the basics and then take things as they come. Does anyone want to bid for my last few rupees in return for a service level agreement promising not years but a certain quality of life?

This is an intensely personal choice but I feel we have gone too far in wanting to extend our lives, no matter what the quality. When we are old, physically ill and emotionally weak, we don’t have the strength to tell our families, take me home, give me pain killers and let me spend my last few days in peace without invasive interventions that will only increase the pain and bring the family to the brink of financial ruin. So I want to join a campaign (it takes years to develop the right mindset) to live and die with dignity; put in place clear instructions on what I want done when I am unable to decide my own treatment — not just when to pull the plug (euthanasia) but when to say no to doubtful costly procedures and treatments.

Captialideasonline.com – 11 Oct 2008

In a classic “The Nature and Logic of Capitalism”, the author, Robert L. Heilbroner, writes on the logic of capitalist development. Schumpeter’s words are worth noting.

“It is that the social formation of capitalism, like that of all others save only primitive society, is at bottom a system of class domi­nation and mass acquiescence. That which distinguishes capitalism from other social formations is not the fact of its hierarchical character but its unique form, in which the drive for power and domination becomes sublimated into the desire to accumulate capital, and in which the expres­sion of subordinate status is manifested through the ac­ceptance of market and property relations. The regimes of capital display a great variety of forms, from the enlightened countries of northern Europe to the repressive Union of South Africa, but all-even those that speak of them­selves as “socialist”-still maintain the institution of capi­tal as the dominating element in their social structures. However hedged about or surrounded by advanced politi­cal and ideological ways and views, the accumulation of capital remains the life force of these nations, the center not only of their economic but of their social and political life.

It follows, then, that at the deepest level the logic of capitalism must also express the imperatives of accumula­tion. The fundamental force that drives the system through history is its search for profit-a search on whose outcome hinges the historical fate of the social formation as a whole. This relentless and insatiable process, into whose genesis and ramifications we have inquired at length, therefore sets into motion the central tendencies of the system. The capitalist path takes different turnings at different periods of history, and the paths of capitalist nations by no means run along exactly parallel tracks; and yet in all its variations, the trajectory of capitalism is immediately recognizable as a movement guided by the imperious need for profit-indeed, as a movement incom­prehensible without an awareness of this central element of its nature.

As I said at the outset, the dynamics of this logic have been the main research objective of all the great econo­mists. The works of Smith and Mill and Marx and Keynes and Schumpeter describe the outcome of a grand drama of accumulation that all recognize as constitutive of, and inseparable from, the innermost principle of being of the system they are studying. That these scenarios reflect diff­ering empirical observations and conceptual perspectives is obvious enough. Less noticed is that the scenarios also embrace a common framework of basic assumptions. From Smith to Schumpeter the great works of political economy recognize that the vital accumulation process hinges on the ability of a capitalist class to extract profit from the system. All further understand that this ability depends on the legitimacy of property rights in the means of production. All also understand that these rights require a mutually supportive division of functions between the realm of business and that of the state-a division of functions that takes for granted the priority of accumula­tion as a necessary condition for a stable social order. These universally recognized preconditions for accumula­tion constitute a tacit delineation of what we have called the “regime” of capital-that is, the depiction of capital­ism as a social formation in which the accumulation of capital becomes the organizing basis for sociopolitical life.

In addition, all the major scenarios are dramas of social as well as material evolution. Growth and change lie at their hearts. In particular, the great economists emphasize that the accumulation process is an agency for social, not just economic, change and that one of its main effects is to alter, for better or worse, the fortunes of the social classes of the system.

Finally, all the great scenarios envisage the regime as having a bounded future. Its span of life cannot be pre­cisely predicted, but its eventual demise or supersession by another social order is universally foreseen. Adam Smith describes the system as reaching a plateau, when the ac­cumulation of riches will be “complete,” bringing about a deep and lengthy decline. John Stuart Mill expects the momentary arrival of a “stationary state,” when accumu­lation will cease and capitalism will become the staging ground for a kind of associationist socialism. Marx antici­pates a sequence of worsening crises produced by the in­ternal contradictions of accumulation-each crisis clear­ing away the obstacles of the moment but hastening the day when the system will no longer be able to manage its self-generated tensions. Keynes thought the future would require a “somewhat comprehensive socialization of in­vestment”; Schumpeter thought it would evolve into managerial socialism.

This broad theme unquestionably raises the crucial as­pect of the logic of capital, namely its capacity to survive in the face of the obstacles and difficulties that accumulation creates. Despite their general consensus with respect to the long-term future, however, the generalized narra­tives of the worldly philosophers have little to tell us about the present or the foreseeable future. Nothing like a time­table exists for the expected life span of the system-Schumpeter, who predicts the system’s passing, cautions that “in these things, a century is a ‘short run.’” There is no agreement on the proper measure of the vitality of the system. Perhaps most striking of all, a hundred years after Marx’s enunciation of a “law” of the falling tendency of the rate of profit, no conclusive evidence exists as to whether the rate of profit has shown a secular decline or not.

Thus an attempt to investigate the logic of the system in terms of its life expectancy yields no more than an anticipation of its eventual decline, an expectation of little use in understanding the present or the near-term future–indeed, an expectation that may cause grave mischief if plans are laid for the system’s quick demise without heed to the possibility that Schumpeter’s calculations with re­spect to the “short run” might prove to be correct.

There is, however, another aspect of the logic of the system, also present although less prominent in the work of the great economists. This is the effect of accumulation in bringing about structural changes within the system-­changes that alter the manner in which capital pursues its unchanging goal. This logic will not come directly to grips with the question of how long profits can be won, a matter that must ultimately be decided by the changing balance of class power-Marx’s “class struggle”; by the ebb and flow of technological opportunity; by the fortunes of war and conquest; and other such largely imponderable fac­tors.”