Emotionally Attached

By Athos,

Before leaning towards the actual topic, let’s talk something about Creativity, What is Creativity? Dictionary say’s

“Creativity is a mental process involving the discovery of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the existing ideas or concepts, fueled by the process of either conscious or unconscious insight.”

Creativity is the most natural cognitive process happening in almost all human minds. We can safely count even those minds that lurk in asylums or those that are lying on the hospital beds in conscious or unconscious sleep because physical manifestation of the creativity is never a condition here. As long as there is mind, there is bound to be ever flowing river of thoughts and ideas inside it, realizable or unrealizable, real or virtual, sane or insane doesn’t really matter.

Leaving aside the definitions, normal folks understand the word creativity in little different angle. We acknowledge Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Jimmy Page’s guitar solo as being creative thing. The word creativity is so much copyrighted by the musicians and artists that we generally never attribute this word with several other things that genuinely deserve this praise. Say for instance, the law of gravity by Newton. Is it not the most creative thing ever materialized? A boring formula and a mathematical equation are creative? You must be joking!

But consider this definition given by Francis Crick of creative act. The creative act he says is the dramatic feeling of the sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clinches into place.

Well is it not same thing happening everywhere? Da Vinci must have experienced this sudden enlightenment when he saw Mona Lisa on one fine morning, or a rocker guitarist must have felt it after one sleepless night at the studio (or perhaps after a strong dose of cocaine!) and no doubt Mr. Newton experienced this sudden rush of thoughts when the apple fell on his head.

Cognitive process is same in all the cases. However if you try to decipher this process which actually leads to the creative output you wont find this an easy enlightenment though. But now since we are already dwelling on the subject lets go deeper still.

At every moment of our existence, we are forever sensing the environment around us (even the environment within us). All these sensations generate emotions in our mind. Some emotions momentarily shine like fire crackers while some remain longer still. These emotions then catch our attention and direct our intellect to find associations between all the emotions that are lying in our mind’s pool. If more and more associations are found then they become ideas. Ideas join together to create a desire. The desires generate motivation and these motivations finally bring about the action.

Don’t sweat! We were just describing the most normal everyday event of you leaving your computer desk fetching a glass of water and drinking it.

You felt the sensation of dropping water level inside your body, that sensory signal generated an emotion inside your mind. This emotion got associated with that emotion generated inside you when you saw water jug in the kitchen few hours ago or when you saw the a glass of water on your desk couple of seconds ago. These emotions generated the idea of you actually leaving your seat and fetching the jug or if you are big brother in your house to majestically order your kid brother to get you a glass of water and these ideas when matured into a desire finally motivated you to take the action which was materialized inside your mind.

Believe it or not all this happened inside you in a stretch of nanoseconds, and we are sure it is still happening inside you at this very moment (unless of course if you are dead!)

Attaching emotions and generating ideas is an intellectual process though. It gets gradually evolved inside you. A baby is able to only cry when feeling thirsty, while grown ups are able to find the water source and drink from it. It takes a formidable effort to generate idea from loose emotions and even more still to bring about the ultimate action from these ideas. It’s a constant evolution happening inside every human; very few are able to control these emotions and generate ideas and actions at will and become stronger in the society. While most of the people only end up dreaming, this refers to nothing but those ideas that are never realized by any external action.

Science calls this phenomenon as Emotional Intelligence.

It is a programmer’s dream to build an emotionally intelligent computer. And like the term dream we explained earlier it is still an idea not realized yet.

Why should a machine be allowed to be emotionally intelligent? Is it not machine’s virtue to be emotionless?

The answer is yes and no. Yes, in cases where machine is designed for problem domain successfully demarcated by fixed formulas or established probabilities. An emotionless machine will do exceedingly better than emotional human counterpart in multiplying and dividing hundred digits numbers or normalizing gigabytes of data to some pattern using established procedures but it’s a different ball game when those problems which have absolutely no fixed solutions arrive. Identifying the problem in the situation is even further than this.

Although the machines have almost overcame the certainties of this world and are rapidly conquering the probabilities their encounter with uncertainties of the world is still in early stages. To tackle uncertainties we need emotional intelligence.

The most natural go ahead is that we need “consciousness” for emotional intelligence. Someone must be conscious of emotions in order to understand them and that ‘someone’ got to be the machine. How to create consciousness? There are some interesting contemporary researches to ponder upon.

Notable are MIT’s KISMET project and LIDA model of Memphis University. (See Cognitive Architectures.)

The LIDA model is based on GWT theory (You must be emotionally attached to these short forms to grasp their true meaning!). Well, GWT stands for “Global Workspace Theory”. The theory assumes that consciousness is associated with global workspace, which is “A fleeting memory capacity whose focal contents are widely distributed (broadcast) to many unconscious specialized networks”.

In programmer’s sense, the GWT theory tries to create one global workspace memory, which is fully connected to the whole system and this memory (i.e. the contents of the memory are correlated with the whole system behavior) is used as input to other memories which are controlling subsystems and which are not aware of the whole system, (i.e. this subsystem’s memory is not correlated with the behavior of the whole system).

The GWT theory in a way tries to model the mind.

The only problem with the LIDA architecture (which is perhaps the implementation of GWT so far) is that although for an external audience, the actions of humanoid built on LIDA will look highly conscious of the internal(of other body organs) and external(of outside body) environments however, one cannot firmly say the same if the working is witnessed internally.

For example, say we created a ‘smiling robot’ based on LIDA. This robot of ours has say two specialized subsystems, one is voice recognition & interaction system and other is a system for controlling facial expression of the robot’s plastic face. This smiling robot of ours, gives a smile and says “Hello, nice to meet you” when he hears an unknown voice.

Using LIDA this can be done really elegantly and for external viewer it would seem like the smiling robot is really happy and smiling to you us as we an unknown is talking to him. But would it be same if you were looking at the internals of its working? I doubt it would be same. Because internally the face system was just trying to coordinate with the voice system, there was no evidence that Mr. Smile was actually ‘happy’ to hear from you.

The problem arising here is because the process of emotional intelligence is never equivalent to input > process > output paradigm of the machine. Instead the emotional intelligence takes the form of experience > understanding > expression. The principal difference between input and experience and that between processing and understanding and also between expression and output is that, when we experience, understand or express, we basically attach some meaning to the actions, while input, process are output are mere actions and carry no meaning by themselves.

Experiencing involves deriving true meaning out of the sensory inputs. Understanding involves fine tuning this ‘meaning’ by the past experiences and expression involves a complex process of conveying this meaning to outside.

Thus, ideally Mr. Smile should derive the meaning “I am listening to a person” when he gets the raw sensory input, then only it will qualify for ‘experience’. Then he should fine tune this meaning to “I am listening to stranger” as the voice does not matches to any previous records, then further it should fine tune it to “I am listening to a stranger, Whenever I hear strangers, I register them into my directory, this increases my contact list and hence I survive more and thus I am happy right now” this is when Mr. Smile would really understand the situation, and then only he will express himself by smiling.

The problem with LIDA is that if tomorrow, Mr. Smile’s jaw mechanism breaks down he will cease to be Mr. Smile thereafter as the stranger’s voice won’t bring smile on his face. Is that same with an emotionally intelligent human being? Of course not! Mr. Smile’s positions is just like any other paralytic who is unable to move his limbs, however unlike Mr. Smile’s total break down, the alive Mr. Smile will desperately search to find means of expressing his happiness and may eventually agree with the interpreter that ‘blinking of an eye will mean he is happy, and then he will smile from his eyelids and not from his lips.

This will happen because he is attached to the emotion of expressing himself which is constantly active in his mind, always on the lookout of forming a composite with the idea of blinking the eye. Implementing experience, understanding and expression in place of dumb input, process and output is the key for creating emotionally intelligent machine.

I agree that the idea of implementing will be very complex one. But as we all are already feeling attached with this emotion, there is no doubt that one day ideas will crystallize and establish a complete understanding of the mind and this understanding will express itself by a really ‘creative’ emotionally intelligent computer.

The View Of God

By Porthos,

So we want to bring a machine to life! For this we need to design an entity called Mind, which is nothing but a logic running continuously until the life is preserved. Or should I say, the life is preserved until this logic is running continuously.

For designing logic we have to take a design oriented view. That means we can take a view where we see the world being visualized in front of the mind, or we can take into consideration how the body of the mind interacts with this world. The first consideration will give us the inside view of the mind and in the second
consideration we have the outside view in the world where we see the body bearing that mind. Which view is accurate and correct? Or both are valid? I’m stuck at this crossroad. Let me analyze both the views further one by one and hopefully I’ll reachmind for it. Mind is the invisible and abstract part of a living body, existence of which is the very reason for the body’s life. At the end of the day, it’ll be nothing to a concrete conclusion.

First, the outside view!

In this scenario, we’ll roam around in the world. We’ll be witnessing our subject as a body. We’ll be majorly looking upon how our subject will move, speak, appear, and react to particular situations coming in its way. So we’ll be able to testify whether the interactions of our subject will be valid in this world or not. In short we’ll have an external glimpse, whether our experiment was successful or not. Pretty accurate picture! But will that be all?

Taking this view sounds very liable. But it does not put light on how the body will actually think during each interaction or action; the exact thoughts and emotions. The biggest loophole in this approach is that even if we make one body which can act, move, and behave in the way we want to, our experiment will be complete. But the problem is, lots of experiments like this have been completed in the past. A perfectly made humanoid robot is the successful end of this endeavor.

In this way, whatever the body will do, it will be justifiable from our view, not by the robot itself. Its inside will be blank machine as always. There won’t be need of emotions and thoughts. There won’t be any need of life at all.

So is the inside view important?

During the inside view scenario, we’ll be the robot or machine itself and from its own point of view, we’ll look at the world. We’ll actually design this point of view under this consideration. This will reflect on its thoughts more accurately and will justify the actions of the robot properly. In this case the machine’s life will be in complete form. It will have thoughts, emotions, and the actions will be logical in conjunction with these.

I believe this should be the most correct approach towards designing mind. But it also has some grave errors. Supposing a mind like this, we won’t need to design any world at all. In robot’s point of view, it can happen that world is just a visualization. The world will just need to contain only the part which is directly in front of the body’s viewpoint. Rest of the things doesn’t need to be there at all. Those things can be taken care by some storyboard script, where it’ll be enough to make the mind believe that the part exists. In this case, the world won’t even exist. And that would be catastrophic mistake in our experiment. If there’s no world, then where will the body of the mind live?

We can explain both the scenarios using a first person shooting game.

When we are actively playing that game, we get the inside view of the bot that is actually representing us in that virtual world. Our own mind becomes the bot’s mind and the bot becomes our avatar in that world of arena.

Whatever is on the monitor screen would be something rendered by the computer’s graphics on the fly upon the command of the game server. Rest of the arena won’t need to be rendered as only the sounds of the encounter coming from that part are enough to make us believe that the part actually is there and some fight and activities are going on there. We, while playing, will continue to believe that if we looking at arena’s part A and part B is out sight, even then the part B exists. We will continue our faith in this world’s existence until the day someone like me realizes, that it’s just a virtual game. Nothing actually exists.

On the other hand, when we take the spectator’s view, or when we are just watching it being played between bots without being the part of the game, we are taking that exterior view.

In this view, we are creating the world, but the bots which are playing will just be computer bots, designed and made to play like a real player. They will be completely blank from inside. The game will be absolutely dead with only living mind in it is actually watching it in spectator’s view, and rest are just humanoid renderings by graphics.

So if both views are flawed, then which one to take? Which one will be the vantage point in this setup? I have a solution!

What about a view that is different and detached from the above two views? A third view. On this idea, a certain question arises that is there still space for any more views? Fortunately there is! For this we’ll have to go out of the dimensions of both the scenarios. It may be perceived as not something of a view, but a space where we can apply some mechanism to synchronize the two views we’ve discussed. From this space outside the dimensions of both the views, we get a clear perspective of both the scenarios.

Now when we go to this third view, we have the control to both of our perspectives. The idea is to pipeline the actions and reactions happening in both the view worlds in such a way that ultimately both of them together start giving out a single common picture. It means whenever the mind does something through its body, that action is captured coming out of the inside view and fed to the outside view by generating a proper effects there. And whatever happens in world of outside view, it is captured and the effects are so produced in mind’s inside view that it perceives the proper changes through its body’s eyes. As all the actions and reactions are synchronously reflected in both the views, they start to emit out an illusion to their respective perceivers that both of them are in single common world. In general sense, we are creating an action pipeline between both the views and that is possible only when we are detached from both.

Let’s explain this further taking the example of our FPS game. Neither we are the bots, nor are we the spectators here. But the logic that is connecting the inputs and outputs of both. Suppose a networked session of the same is going on, where few of the gamers are playing as bots on their respective screens, and some spectators are watching the ongoing game via some big common LCD projectors. Now we take the place of the server, and our job is to take the inputs from every portal and broadcasting the effects on all the systems on the network. Because of this activity, everyone in the session will get the clear and common picture of the game, rather than each one having a different perspective in case of standalone environment. For example, if one the gamers fire a bullet at another bot, the screen of the gamer who is controlling that another bot should display a bullet coming down at him. And in the same case, the spectators should get the whole picture of one bot shooting a bullet at another bot at the same time. This activity will go on until even a single one of them is present in the session. If all of them retire, the timespace ends for both the scenarios as there is no activity coming out from anywhere and the session ends. This will give the illusion to all of them in such a way that they’d think that actually they are watching a game that is going on at a common arena.

This is the view we need. In this regard, we’ll design the mind, and we’ll also design the world for it. And then we’ll connect both in a common time dimension so that both will be justifiable to each other. If we are the creator of this world and the entities living in it, so the view will be the view of the creator itself. Rather we can say, it will be “The View of God”!

The New Model of Intelligence

By Porthos


The breathing machine! Quite an amazing idea. Have one thought about it and suddenly in your mind appears the plot of a James Cameron Sci Fi futuristic blockbuster. But it can also be very unfathomable in reality. A breathing machine is nothing but a machine which is alive like any other living being we can see and perceive around. Not just a machine which is mimicking the real life process of inhaling and exhaling air continuously. We call it the breathing machine as this process is the most identifying feature of a living organism.

But why this idea hasn’t become reality till date? We know that scholars around the world are trying to compile a mechanical and electrical device or robot, which can act and think like a human being. Even after that we find certain limitations in all these attempts and the dream of realizing this feat remains unattained.

Because of these continuous attempts, this type of machine has become somewhat like a holy grail for all the intellectuals around the world. Every one of them is taking his own route to find that ultimate philosopher’s stone which can turn their hard work in gold.

In this record, I’ll try to look into and analyze the nature of various attempts made in this regard and their general outcome. Also I’ll try to devise one more implementation which can be helpful in our efforts.

Until now, every time we’ve tried to compile a living robot, we’ve tried to make it more or less like human beings. At the end of such experiments, we find humanoid robots being compiled. These robots look and act like humans but still remain a robot or just a mechanical device. They continue to remain in the control of some external entity like us. They are not in control of themselves, just as we are or in fact any other living being is, even the microbes. The day these machines come in full control of themselves that day, that day only we’ll be able to say that we have a breathing machine among us. Until then, we’ll continue assembling more and more humanoid robots.

The mistake we commit is that we always strive to make the machine just like a human being. Rather we should try to identify the characteristics of life and then embed those in our subject of experiment. In this way, this machine will actually be alive, which would be much better fulfillment of our basic objective, rather than just acquiring a human form.

We’ll need to create a high form of intelligence for our machine for this. We’ve tried to achieve this goal by writing lots and lots of algorithms for it and then storing them all in our machine’s permanent memory. We write these algorithms keeping a particular situation in mind. So they come useful only in their own respective condition. In that way, if we want to make a machine which would be as near as possible intelligent to a human being, we’d have to write nearly millions of algorithms for it. Still we won’t get our breathing machine.

There is one more way of acquiring this objective. If we analyze the behavior of any living being around us, we’ll find that they grow and learn new things in the way. Nobody writes new algorithms for them in this learning phenomenon. They just acquire new knowledge on their own with the help of world around. We can obviously see that this is achieved with their basic intelligence and capabilities they were born with. These capabilities are their ability to see, smell, hear, speak, feel etc. Rest of the knowledge they get by using and through the window of these capabilities only. So the knowledge they attain after being born is actually derived from their basic capabilities. In this case we get two forms of intelligence: Capability Intelligence, which is the minimum level of intelligence every living being is born with, and Derived intelligence, which is based on the roots of capability intelligence. Until and unless these two intelligences are not linked together, the bearer’s intelligence will not be complete and it can’t be called alive.

By writing algorithms, we try to model the derived intelligence for the machine. So the derived intelligence is created artificially and is independent from the capability intelligence of our subject. We should rather strive to find the basic capabilities of the machine of interest, what it can or can’t basically do, then make a bootstrap program for it which would be nothing but a synchronizing mechanism between the capability elements. When this bootstrap program will be executed, the breathing machine will be born.

Upon being brought in this world, with this bootstrap program executing, the machine will use its capabilities to perceive the world. These capabilities will define what inputs will be filtered and will ultimately be fed to its memory. According to the form and quantity of the inputs coming to our machine, it will gather experiences and knowledge. And this knowledge will become the derived intelligence for the machine. This way we’ll be saved from writing infinite number of intelligent algorithms for our subject of experiment and the two intelligences we discussed will be created in place and linked together perfectly. So our machine will truly be alive.

Let’s take a simple example. Suppose like an animal or human being, our machine has the basic capabilities to see and smell. The machine will see something and at the same time smell something. May be the sources of the two are independent of each other, but as the machine is getting both the inputs at the same time, it will go into its memory as a single unit having two characteristics. In future, when the machine will get one of those inputs again, it will feel the effect of second input also in its mind. Machine can also attach some action to the input, which will be taken at the point of getting that input again.

The reason we need to target this capability intelligence is that as compared to the number of elements in derived intelligence, the number of elements in capability intelligence is small and finite. So it is much easier and practical to model in the labs. And this also is very alike to the model of intelligence we have.

Now as the derived intelligence will be based on the capabilities of the machine, so the world they will perceive will also be based upon that only, which could be very different than how we perceive ours. In our real lives also, that a human being lacking any of the basic capabilities have his own perception and view of the world. A blind man’s world will be different from what other fortunate people can see. In any case, the machine with such intelligence will be alive and breathing, and we’ll have our holy grail with us.

Physics without the Soul

By Athos,

“Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions and combination's of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seems to me to be empty and devoid of meaning.”

In these words the great Albert Einstein dismissed the existence of soul without the physics. If we take out all the matter of our body then whatever is left can be correctly called ‘empty’, ‘devoid of meaning’ and utterly unimaginable in any real sense….

Great men always draw the line that is followed by faithful followers and Einstein had many. With a stubborn assumption that in this world only the physical matter, is the ‘real’ and ‘measurable’ while the soul and self are mere abstractions above it, Physics like all the other sciences has never dared to cross this line.

However like every theory and equation in mathematics and logic, this prodigious theory also has a possible corollary.

If the soul without body is empty and devoid of meaning then the body without soul is equally empty and devoid of meaning.

Many scientists will strongly disagree with the idea but the bottom line is they cannot entirely disapprove it. If the universe, the big bang, the galaxies and solar system is a wonder, then “I am here to witness this universe” is perhaps the wonder of wonders.

Ironically, the great Einstein himself ignored his own theories when downgrading the soul. Was it not Einstein who first advocated the importance of the witness to an event? The legendary theory of relativity centers on the witness and his ‘frame of reference’. Although Einstein propounded the ‘time-space’ he was forever assuming that there is a witness or selfish entity or soul who is witnessing and sensing that time and space.

However the extremist thinkers are not only to be found at the one end of the argument, there is another thought process, popular among many religious thinkers and spiritual intellectuals. This says that in this world, the soul is the only real thing while everything else is a worthless abstraction, a Maya.

This school of thought also like its scientific counterpart can never fully refuse the validity of their opponent’s viewpoint. The metaphysics first struggles to define the soul itself. The best effort they can put in this front is something like “Whatever that is not this….and not this….and not even this… is the soul” basically it means that soul is not like anything we know in this world. So they assume that there is world in first place and it is not as meaningless as they say about it often.
Although we are not interested in debating which argument stands in the end (as we know many budding scientists and spiritual gurus are making a career out of it and we don’t want to throw them out of the business), we were forced to take decision on this boiling issue when we started designing the ‘breathing’ machine.

The robotic engineers wouldn’t give a damn about these theories when asked to design an Artificial Life. Why we should ever care about it they will say, is it not straightforward that we should build an autonomous robot that behaves perfectly like any living creature or organism? A terminator or something of that sort.

The only problem with this idea is that it is not as straightforward as it seems. There is no perfect boundary line drawn which separates a mechanical doll imitating human or some other animal from actual living body. The line is not drawn yet because there is no universal agreement on what living body actually means in the first place. While the followers of Einstein hold on to the argument that living body is nothing but combination of sensors, processors and devices and combining these things together will produce body, on the other hand the followers of Gautam Buddha will hold that even a rock has soul and emotions hence it is a living body already and no need to create any.

Here we stumbled on a kind of logical junction in our project of building a living machine. Either we have to believe that Physics exists without the soul and start building a humanoid robot OR we assume that soul exists without the physics which means ‘everything’ is living in the first place, and focus on ways of understanding the emotions of the machine. So either take admission in MIT or join a yoga class there is no other way.

Both these seemingly logical approaches stealthily hide their far fetched assumptions and hopes. When MIT engineer builds humanoid robots he actually hopes by some miracle this robot will get self conscious and gradually evolve to become a real living body. The yoga scholar trying to communicate with the machine (or any object for that matter) hopes that some day he will actually bind (yoga) with that object and may communicate with it as if it were living or may experience life from within the object.

If the research’s success is based on an event which is totally out of your control like machine achieving self consciousness on its own, or machine responding to your communication then we cannot term it as a perfectly logical enterprise.

Rather than endlessly debating whether chicken came first or the egg came first, we should understand that in this world, egg and the chicken came out of each other. The physics and all the sciences which study the physical matter are witnessed from the soul, while soul is witnessed from the physical world. We cannot imagine one without the other.

Any attempt to create a life ignoring this simple fact will not be complete. An attempt focusing only on physical matter will end up creating a terminator robot, and we will never be sure of whether there is anyone ‘inside’ it or it is just a maze of interconnected devices. On the same lines, an attempt to create life believing world is just a maya will end up creating a Matrix, and it will never be ‘real’ world but delirious dream cooked up by mind.

The deal is simple, either you create a false world and a real self (matrix), or you create a real world with false self (robot).

Rather than being a fanatic and following either of the two approaches is it not possible to combine these extreme viewpoints of life into one?

Rather than creating only exterior (body) or only interior (mind) and faking out the remaining part, which is a popular approach of the present, we should actually build both the exterior and the interior and connect them both. By this way we will not fake up any of the ends and world would be complete from inside to outside.

Let me put this argument in one simple example.

Suppose we are designing robot which can actually speak with us and suppose we are following the ‘exterior’ strategy i.e. the robot should externally look and feel like a speaking body. Typically we will first create plastic mould which would look exactly like a human face. Then we would fit a speaker under his lips, so anything coming out of the speaker will actually feel like coming out of the mouth. Then at the place of ears we would fit our sound recorders and we will record every sound coming to it in nice little hard drive hidden beneath what it appears as its skull. Then we will fit a processor chip besides the hard drive and store a program on it written by some geek computer scientist, which will for every recorded sound, jumble the quadratic equations and swift through data structures and query giga byte databases to finally flush out the response ‘sound’ out of the speaker. Thus a processor with hard drive and a set of recorder and speaker using a good makeup will fake out as ‘speaking body’. Can we hope to build a real speaking machine using this paradigm?

The other strategy which we call ‘interior’ strategy is not also behind in act of faking.

Consider your favorite I-Phone application or word processors or your favorite Counter Strike Game. They are all created to fake exterior virtual world in front of your real interior senses. To create a 3d game , it is not required to create a real 3d world but a 2d picture which will fake your eye into believing that it is a 3d world. Rather than creating a real object which can be touched, creating a touch screen ‘interface’ can do a similar trick. Why to create a real paper, when you can fake the eye by drawing a white sheet on the digital screen…

The problem in both of these theories is that they are totally fake at the one of the ends. So the entities created using these ideas are always ‘half’ complete in terms of real living entities. Thus, in the most layman-like idea we are proposing to join these two complimenting halves.

In one approach we can create a world in front of the real eyes. While in other we can create eyes in front of the real world. What if we place these ‘created’ eyes in front of the ‘created’ world. Since both of these are equally fake or equally real, together can they create a fully functioning living world?

The idea is rather than forcing robot to look like human or animal in our world or modeling virtual world relative only to human senses, we will build new body for sensing new worlds and imagine the sensor(soul) to be ‘inside’ of this body rather than outside.

In reality also, the human witness of living world is optional. Can u see bacteria’s world externally or internally? Can u see bacteria’s body by your raw senses? Or Can you feel what bacteria senses from inside his body? No. Yet when designing an Artificial life we place a stubborn condition that we (humans) should witness this world either externally (robot approach) or internally (FPS game approach),

The trick is that the Artificially living entity should live in the world which is in accordance with its senses and whatever actions it does in that world (expression) should make sense only in that world and not the human world. His internal world (cognitive world) should correspond to his external world (physical world).

Take example of a snake. A snake sees the world in a different way than we humans do. We can only imagine what scene of this world unfolds in front his eyes. Whatever actions he takes are logical in the world he senses and not the world we sense. The intelligence of snake is founded on the world he experiences thus any science he will develop will be much different than us but most definitely it will be fully accurate in his world.

To model this world we need to combine the concepts of science with the concepts of soul i.e. we should not only concentrate on building an artificial snake but we should also model an artificial world in front of his eyes. Our experience in building robots can be handy in creating artificial snake body, while our experience in programming counter strike and FPS game can made useful in modeling snake’s world in front of his eyes.

The combination of physics and metaphysics can completely define the living world. Rather than studying these concepts in isolation often at the cost of degrading one, there should be an effort to find the correlation between them. As they both are mere viewpoints of the one living world.

The bottom line is, that Physics without soul and vice versa is an incomplete strategy of building Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence.

Dream of Breathing Machine

Few years back three inseparable friends sat in the same row of one sleepy classroom of Masters course in Computer Application. They generally avoided sleeping in the class, not because they liked taking notes and marking textbooks but because they found out that there are other interesting things to do than yawning and sleeping during the lectures.

Gurashis a.k.a Porthos enjoyed writing poems that would have made Edgar Alan Poe shudder in his tomb. He also used to confess that only in that classroom he feels the tomb-like claustrophobia and his ghost breaks out to fill the paper with deadly rhymes. He derived his inspiration from dark metal songs and would relentlessly talk about the fender Stratocasters, Gibson les paul, major, minor and power chord. After all, he was the best C programmer of our class.

Abhishek a.k.a Aramis used to get philosophical in the class especially when the most boring subjects were taught. He generally knew everything beforehand hence used to break the monotony with the conversations on the philosophies of yoga, the cosmic energies the pranayams and what not.

Milind a.k.a Athos, who sat in between them, filled his notebook with drawings and sketches. He enjoyed suggesting the rhymes for Porthos’s poems and discuss Eric Von Daniken with him, On the other hand, He liked discussing Mahabharat and Upnishads with Aramis.

It was an enjoyable place, full of interesting conversations. Conversation which their professors unfortunately missed out.

On that one faithful day when Porthos had not quite begun on writing his stanzas, and Aramis was not in the mood of conversation as that was the first lecture of the day and he had made sort of resolution to pay attention to this lecture, and Athos had realized that his notebook was full and there was hardly any place left to draw upon, all of them miraculously paid attention to the class. This lecture was on Operating System.

Since Athos was a newbie to the computer science, he used to fire his curious questions at Aramis and Porthos who were veterans in this field. For every question of Athos, Aramis used to give perfect textbook definitions while Porthos used to chip in for explaining the concepts in layman’s language. The ppt slide of the lecture had the heading “Operating System Kernel”

“What the hell is this Operating System Kernel?” Athos asked, to other two.

“Kernel is the fundamental part of the OS, It’s like daemon process that always runs at the core of the system in infinite loop. Whenever Operating System starts the kernel is first pulled into the memory…then it establishes communication with hardware…” when the next sentences bounced over Athos’s head, Porthos chipped in for rescue and explained him Operating System in the most simple words possible and then concluded with masterful statement “see… if you imagine computer like a body then Operating System is designed like a mind”. “Exactly!” echoed Aramis.

Athos was so impressed with this metaphor that he started witnessing the lecture with this perspective in my mind. To his amazement he was grasping concepts faster than before and all the things started fitting in nicely in the puzzle. After few minutes a sudden idea came to his mind, it was more to complete the metaphor than anything else.

“If you say Operating System is the mind of computer body then the kernel must be the breath!”

All three looked at each other; a new interesting conversation had begun!

The discussion was taken further into deeper levels by Athos and Aramis, while hanging out together. Porthos was barging in time by time lending his ears to the discussions going on. The talks went further getting converted into materialistic ideas. The ideas got noted down roughly in notebooks, diaries and even digitally in digital forms. Soon these accumulations got turned into their real passionate dream. The integration was taking form of a calculated scientific research of creating intelligence fully in control of itself. The intelligence which would truly be alive and breathing.

They peeked into whether researches with same ideas were going around. They found some with similar efforts but still vastly different from what they thought. Present researches were based on algorithms and predefined procedures trying to mimic each and every possible activity of the living organism. But all of these attempts lacked the basic understanding of a living intelligence which can be defined in a very basic sense, and still be powerful enough to create these algorithms on the fly according to the need. This basic intelligence would make its bearer alive even if it is made of wires and circuits. Journey towards creation of this entity included Contemporary Science of Aramis, Mythological Philosophies of Athos and The rocker attitude of Porthos. The definition of this intelligence became their motto and objective.

Further discussions in this blog will be based upon the extracts and the findings from their notebooks and the diaries. They will be kept in front of your observation for you to add your own views and ideas to them.

So all of you are invited to come together to join the adventure these three musketeers have begun with a dream, that is, The dream of a Breathing Machine!

All for one, One for All !