Ray Kurzweil is one of the most vocal proponents of the acendency of thinking machines. His The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, written in 1999 is dated, but that is a good thing for a book predicting the future! You can see how many predictions have come true. Much of what he predicted for 2009 is on the money. The interesting thing is that these predictions, which must have seemed wild in the last century, are just part of our everyday life!
The picture of the future he paints is one where machines and humans join to form a new intelligent species. His positive view of this brave new world is infectuous, but he is careful to evaluate the position of the naysayers, and respond. (more…)

Allan Snyder and his team of researchers have shown that “savant” capabilities can be induced in people without Autism by using the strong magnetic field of a Transcranial Magnetic Stimulator to inhibit the action of the left anterior temporaral cortex. According to a post on www.huge-entity.com the theory behind this effect is that the TMS suppresses filtering and grouping mechanisms of the brain, thereby directly “connecting” the raw sensory data to the number estimation functionsof the brain. By allowing this direct connection between the estimation process and the raw data the brain was able to function in the ‘savant’ mode. (more…)

Dileep George has conducted research into modeling the structure of the human neocortex and constructed artificial neocortical arrays that mimic thought processes. These arrays are arranged in a heirarcial structure, with some closely connected to sensors and others a level removed, and so forth. Each heirarchial level resolves the invariant portions of a signature of the inputs through learning. His example of the visual cortex’s ability to identify the difference between a dog and a helicopter independent of position, version or race through learning. An audio recording of Dileep’s paper is at http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail732.html
The structure and organization of the neocortex requires a number of relationships and feedbacks including statistics, probability and temporal feedback. It occurs to me that the human perception of time may be inextricably linked to this temporal feedback. If time is not a fundimental feature of the universe, but instead simply a “rate variable” clocked by our own neocortex, then the time we have used as reference for all of our present science may be merely an artifact of our mind’s perception. (more…)

I have had the pleasure of serving as alpha, or beta after my wife to a number of dogs. In this capacity it became obvious to me that dogs do not have the same sense of time that people have. For people, time is a continuum, constantly seeming to flow from the past to the future.

When a properly cared for dog’s people leave and then return the joy and pleasure on their return is as complete and total whether the absense has been ten minutes or ten days. The dog seems to know no difference! If you go away for a minute or two and return, the dog recognizes that you have only been absent momentarially and greets with only a modest recognition.

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The mind is often thought of as a continuously operating “machine” handling all the inputs and giving all the outputs that are part of our daily experience. I have come to the conclusion that our minds are more like the SETI@home project than a Cray Supercomputer. Each of the things that must be processed, whether it is your homework, lunch, breathing, interpersonal relationships, driving a car, Mozart, walking or philosophy are processed by a part of your nervious system working in teams or semi-independently on the particular task at hand.

These different processes are coupled more or less closely by the neurological connections formed by habit. It is likely that you will solve similar problems in ways that are similar those that were sucessful before. The brain’s “wiring” is connected by experience. There is obviously a lot of “wiring” that comes from instinct, and probably from “race memory” where your ancestor’s successes in solving certain problems effected the morphology and ease of developing the same “circuits” as your grandparents’.

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